Microsoft believes big data is a “big deal”. Hence, the company has been investing a lot in related technologies and communities, which help it improve its own machine learning development. At the ongoing big data and data science conference, Strata + Hadoop World, Microsoft has announced new cloud based offerings that will make it easier for data scientists to process big data. The company has contributed to various open source data science projects and is a founding member of the R Consortium. Recently, it also revealed that SQL Server 2016 is headed to Linux, with support for big data analytics. Today, Microsoft announced the launch of R Server for HDInsight and an update to its Spark for HDInsight service, which is a managed implementation of the Apache Spark framework in…